The wrong ally is deadlier than an enemy…
In the Civilized World, everyone is rich, yet money doesn’t buy safety. It only buys a gold coffin. The real currency is having the right allies. Low-citizens survive by joining high-citizens’ exclusive inner circles, trading loyalty for protection from laws that govern speech, dress, and posture—and punish mistakes with public beheading.
Low-citizen Loredana Waldsten already knows the cost of breaking the rules. Once a rising fencing prodigy, she lost the right to carry weapons after killing a high-citizen in a brutal locker-room attack. The courts erased his death to preserve his family’s honor. Now she’s unarmed, legally defenseless, and enrolled at the elite Grandmaster University, where champagne spills into the gutters and reputations are built on death duels.
When Loredana’s father, a low-citizen politician, publicly challenges the high-citizens, she becomes a target. Some classmates demand her execution. Others hunt her for sport. And by law, she’s forbidden to fight back.
Her only chance of survival lies with Edmund Prew, a powerful and ruthless high-citizen student she’s been warned against. His family has been locked in a bitter feud with Loredana’s for years, and he wants nothing to do with her until a lost bet forces him to protect her within his inner circle. What begins as a scandalous, strategic alliance turns perilous as they fall for each other.
Because the man Loredana killed wasn’t just a high-citizen.
He was Edmund’s cousin.
Loving Edmund means living a lie.
Telling the truth means certain death.
You don’t get to hand me flowers with the same hands that threw knives.
LOREDANA WALDSTEN, CHAPTER 20I knew myself before her. With her, I know myself better. But if there were ever an after her, I’d become a stranger to myself.
EDMUND PREW, CHAPTER 37The worst part about hell isn’t the fire. And it’s not who rules it either. It’s that once you’re there, you can never leave.
BRUCE WALDSTEN, CHAPTER 1We created gods, and in our blinding, reckless vanity, never asked the question: What happens if these gods come to despise us?
DOMINIC CRUPP, CHAPTER 15It’s more dangerous for a high-citizen and a low-citizen to fall in love with their differences than to believe no differences exist at all.
CRISPIN ROTH, CHAPTER 26The only sure way to stop a thief is to cut off their hands.
ROSAMUND PREW, CHAPTER 24Even if the law says there can be no future with him, I understand now that there can be no future for me without him.
LOREDANA WALDSTEN, CHAPTER 37Gaze too long at the street, and you’ll forget you live in the gutter.
DICKIE LANGLEY, CHAPTER 31Everyone wants greatness until they realize it requires sacrificing what they love for what they believe in.
HARRISON SOMERSET, CHAPTER 11Truth must breathe. Force it into the airless coffin of secrecy, and it will die, strangled inside you, only to return as a ghost that haunts eternally.
TATTLETALE, CHAPTER 39I used to think survival was the most important. Now, I know that the way you choose to survive matters even more.
CHARLOTTE DEERING, CHAPTER 25There can be love without happiness, but never happiness without love.
HENRY, CHAPTER 35The only man I regret killing is the one who smiled, for he had the dignity to laugh at his own misfortune.
JULIAN LAKE, CHAPTER 43The difference between comedy and tragedy is perspective.
JEROME, CHAPTER 40We loved as fiercely as we loathed and erred as deeply as we triumphed. Yet perhaps our gravest folly lay in the lie we told ourselves and repeated to each other with equal conviction: that all love is righteous and all hatred wicked.
THE DANDIES, CHAPTER 61In the end, truth makes fools of us all.
TATTLETALE, CHAPTER 56You can measure a person’s heart by their courage in the moment, and their soul by how they bear the cost of what follows.
BRUCE WALDSTEN, CHAPTER 55Unhappiness is a disease, and I discovered the cure.
GREGORY SAVILE, CHAPTER 4Training can’t prepare a man for his end. In that moment, his spirit rises, and more often than not, death is the first to see his true face.
RAFE HARDY, CHAPTER 16A man may witness the turning of the world and bear faithful record of its course, but he is not meant to feel what he sees. For, to feel it, would be to carry every hope and every ruin, every triumph and every tragedy, until he shoulders the weight of the world itself.
BENJAMIN BOGART, CHAPTER 41He never arrives empty-handed. Each time, he brings me something he gathers on
his run—a feather from a mountain bird, a shard of pale quartz, a smooth stone
threaded with a natural vein—as if, piece by piece, he’s bringing me the whole world.
BECAUSE I KILLED HIM
